Study: Male upper body strength strongly correlates with political views

The (UK) Daily Mail reports on a new psychological study:

Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study.

The conclusion that liberals are wimps is appealing but the Daily Mail got it wrong: the actual study results are more complex than that.  I found the original research paper on SSRN (both abstract and full text available).  The abstract, in full, states:

Over human evolutionary history, upper body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants. Here, we apply these models to political decision-making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in Argentina, Denmark and the U.S., men with greater upper body strength more strongly endorsed the self-beneficial position: Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution. As personal upper body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision-making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.[Emph. added]

In other words, the study concludes that (a) strong upper-class men oppose redistribution but (b) strong lower-class men support it (think of the stereotypical Marxist/union thugs).

The study, a joint project of three universities, reached the same conclusion in each of three countries studied: Argentina, the US, and Denmark.  At the risk of getting technical, here is their figure 1 which has the correlation coefficient data supporting their conclusions (you will need to click on the figure for a larger, more legible view):

Put another way, this study says that liberals are a coalition of rich wimpy men and strong poor men.  By contrast, conservatives are a coalition of rich strong men and poor weak men.

The study found that women are different from men: a woman's upper body strength did not affect her politics.

Partisans would like to think that it is the smart people who support their side.  In reality, though, that doesn't work: both sides have their share of both smart people and dumb people.

By contrast, this study, with its exceptionally strong correlation coefficients, seems to be on to something more substantial.  I suspect, though, that future studies will find that a person's politics are more determined by some aspect of a person's anxiety levels for which physical strength is just one contributing factor. 

WELCOME to readers of Instapundit, Transterrestrial Musings, the (Sydney) Daily Telegraph, and CultureWarNotes.

History repeating itself: Hillary's tall tales

If Hillary's behavior toward Benghazi seems strange, consider the travel office scandal from 1993.   In search of patronage jobs, Hillary ordered that the travel office staff be fired: WH head administrator David Watkins quoted her as saying "We need those people out. We need our people in. We need the slots.''   The firing occurred despite the fact that many of those fired had worked steadily in the WH for decades serving many presidents.

The firing of the travel office staff was not in anyway a crime: it was perfectly legal.

Yet, for the Clintons, that wasn't enough.  In a Nixonian abuse of governmental power, White House pressure led to the prosecution of one of the travel member of the office, Billy Dale, on trumped up charges, charges that were quickly dismissed by the jury.

So it appears to be with Benghazi.  The administration could simply have claimed to have made the best decisions they could based on the information from Libya available at the time while condemning the Monday-morning quarterbacks.  Instead, they concocted a ridiculous story about a movie protest.

Why take such extraordinary steps to cover up something that was legal to begin with?  We have all known kids whose first instinct, when caught with a hand in the cookie jar, was to lie.    Hillary seems to be one of those kids who just never grew out of it.

Related, from Hope n'Change:

Obama invites his audience to dinner. . .

From Liberal Logic.

California and Global Warming: how many will die because of a failing theory?

Tonight, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) held a public hearing to explain their 25-year transportation and housing plan to residents of the San Francisco peninsula.  One set of their posters summarized where they think their plan succeeds and where it fails.  Let's look first at where ABAG thinks they missed their targets (click on any photo to enlarge):

Top on the list of missed targets is "reduce injuries and fatalities from collisions."   Instead of a reduction, injuries and fatalities are projected to increase by 18%.   Common methods for reducing traffic accidents include adding stoplights or improving signage.  Apparently, these are not a priority for ABAG.

Also on the list of missed target is highway maintenance.  ABAG projects that "the percentage of poor quality state highway lane-miles in the region will rise to 44 percent of the regional highway system by year 2040."  In other words, despite California's ever increasing state taxes, nearly half of the Bay Area's highways will be in "poor" condition.

So, what does the plan succeed at?  Where is all our ever increasing tax money going?  Here is the section of the poster showing ABAG's claimed successes:

ABAG's top claimed success, their "target #1," is "climate protection":  their plan projects a per capita reduction in CO2 emissions of 18% by 2040.

There was a nice friendly ABAG official standing beside these posters.  I asked him why they weren't instead doing more about reducing traffic fatalities.  He kindly explained that it wasn't a priority while reducing CO2 was.

So we are going to suffer not only poor roads but also greater traffic deaths all for the goal of reducing carbon emissions.  How many people will have to die in the name of Al Gore's failing theory?

MORE:  Since the San Francisco Bay Area suffers from traffic congestion, I wondered what they planned to do about that in the next 25 years.  The map below provides the answer:

While they do plan to improve a few interchanges (green dots on the map), they will not widen a single highway within Silicon Valley.  The only highway widenings (solid red lines on the map, marked by arrows 20 and 22) are outside of Silicon Valley.    The only other highway projects in their plans are "highway operational improvements," which, according to the explanation I was given, is a euphemism for making carpool lanes more restrictive.

STILL MORE: ABAG has adopted Obama's abuse of language.  The chart below shows "investments":

Notice that 90% of "investments" are merely maintenance, something any accountant would recognize as an expense not an "investment."

Note also in the chart above that "road and bridge expansion"  gets the same amount of money as mass transit.  This happens despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of passenger-miles (90 to 97%) is traveled on roads and bridges, and not on the heavily-subsidized mass transit system.  The 97% should revolt against the 3%!

Lastly, ABAG's adherence to political correctness extends well beyond a belief in global warming.  To design the SF Bay Area's transportation system, they studied projections for race and ethnicity, producing plots such as this:

If you read their reports, you will see they claim that these skin pigmentation issues affect what transportation improvements will be needed.

Overall, ABAG's 25-year plan seems to be a painful confirmation of Reynold's Second Law:   “The more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government.”

For more on ABAG's 25-year plan, dubbed "One Bay Area,"  click here.

What motivated Tamerlan Tsarnaev to become a bomber?

Tamerlin Tsarnaev

The New York Times quotes an in-law of Tamerlan Tsarnaev [photo at right is from his 2009 arrest] to explain what it was that made Tamerlan so angry:

Elmirza Khozhugov, 26, the ex-husband of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s younger sister, Ailina, said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been enamored of conspiracy theories, and that he was also concerned by the wars in the Middle East. 

“He was looking for connections between the wars in the Middle East and oppression of Muslim population around the globe,” Mr. Khozhugov said in an e-mail. “It was very hard to argue with him on themes somehow connected to religion. On the other hand, he did not hate Christians. He respected their faith. Never said anything bad about other religions. But he was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.”[Emph. added]

How would the world have gotten that idea?  Wouldn't such mis-characterizations of Islam be enough to make anyone want to bomb the Boston Marathon?

Maureen Dowd: Obama is a slow learner, not an adult

In her New York Times column this weekend, liberal Maureen Dowd praises Obama's ability "to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments," such as after the Boston Bombing.  She then provides some frank statements on Obama's lack of political skills:

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern. 

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.  ....

President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that’s not how adults with power respond to things. [Emph. added]

It would be nice if Democrats had discovered this back when there was still time to prevent America from having to suffer through two terms of an incompetent president.

PREVIOUSLY on Maureen Dowd:
•Yet another New York Times scandal, or two
•A Democrat's inner child
•Somebody had a bad childhood
•What is the victim status of your identity group?

Howard Dean says Obama not liberal enough, may cause Dean to leave Democrat Party

Howard Dean

Buzzfeed reports:

On Sunday night, Dean tweeted that the restoration of some defense sequestration cuts contained in Obama's budget proposal were a step too far when coupled with the president's entitlement cut proposal that progressives like Dean are already livid about. . . .

"I just think that's unacceptable," Dean said. "If this passed I would have to reevaluate if I belong in the Democratic Party. If this were passed with Democratic votes, I think it would be impossible to be Democrat."
"I would have to oppose any Democrat that is supportive of this," Dean added.

How large would a deficit have to be for "progressives" to consider it too large?

RELATED:
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Politico's willful ignorance

In Today's Politico, two reporters, Josh Gerstein and Jennifer Epstein ponder what the Boston bombers' motives could have been:

Djohar Tsarnaev's webpage reportedly described his "worldview" as "Islam."  It is reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev's youtube account focused on Islam and had a playlist called "terrorists."  Both (reportedly) tried to kill and maim as many random infidels as they could.

Politico claims its confusion comes from not understanding why Chechen emigres would kill infidels in America rather than Russia — as if Islamists would consider that to be an important distinction.

It is more than a decade since 9-11.  Politico cannot be this ignorant unless it is trying to be.

Survivor of communism explains his opposition to gun control

"You don't know what freedom is because you never lost it....  The only reason for the gun control is for the gun control is the government to protect [itself] from the citizens.  That way the government can ... subjugate them.  That's what happened in Cuba for 54 years." --Manuel Martinez, Salem, OR, April 5, 2013

PREVIOUSLY on guns, crime, and the right of self-defense:
•Where do criminals actually get their guns? What about the gun show loophole?
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•Paradox: student test scores improve despite school funding decrease
•News report: Gun crime down "despite" increase in gun sales
•Popular resistance to gun control
•Thousands attend San Francisco rally in support of the 2nd Amendment

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

From the heroic age of conservatism, here is a photo of Prime Minister Thatcher with President Reagan at Camp David in 1986:

For those of you too young to remember, this video shows Margaret Thatcher explaining to an opposition member of Parliament what's wrong with the liberal view of "income inequality":

If only McCain or Romney could have thought and spoken so clearly.

Where do criminals actually get their guns? What about the gun show loophole?

When President Obama announced his gun-violence task force results back in January, he declared:

“The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun.  But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.” [Emph. added]

Does this mean that we should close the "gun show loophole"?  The most recent numbers on this come from a 1997 survey (full text available here) conducted by the US Bureau of Just Statistics.  Here is the actual data (from p.10) on where criminals got their guns:

Source: US Bureau of Justice Statistics

Gun shows account for a statistically insignificant 1.7% of guns possessed by criminals.  That is because criminals get their guns overwhelmingly from the sources one would expect: friends, family, drug dealers, the black market, and theft.

More on FDR and anti-Semitism

FDR

Although he started out being quite popular with Jews, Franklin D. Roosevelt's reputation has been sinking with continued revelations.  See, for example, this 1994 Newsweek review of a PBS documentary.   Some of the criticism of FDR seems unfair. He is, for example, faulted for not devoting more Allied bombing raids to attacks against German railroads leading to Auschwitz and other death camps. Bombing railroads, however, particularly with WWII technology, was of limited value: bombs were unlikely to hit a railroad and even if they did, railroads could be quickly and cheaply repaired. Nevertheless, questions continue. The latest allegations are from historian Rafael Medoff. He was interviewed by The Daily Caller:

“In his private, unguarded moments, FDR repeatedly made unfriendly remarks about Jews, especially his belief that Jews were overrepresented in many professions and exercised too much influence and control on society,” Medoff told The Daily Caller in an email about his new book, “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.”

“This prejudice helped shape his overall vision of what America should look like — and it was a vision with room for only a small number of Jews who, he said, should be ‘spread out thin.’

PREVIOUSLY on left/liberal anti-Semitism:
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•Louis Farrakhan
•CNN's anti-Semite
•Hate crimes statistics, Jews, and Muslims, and more
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•The academic left and anti-Semitism: Walt and Mearsheimer
•More on anti-Semitism and foreign policy
•Anti-Semitism and the Connecticut Senate race

Obamacare to cause 32% raise in healthcare costs; Administration defends

The Washington Guardian reports price increases coming as a result of Obamacare:

In a report that could prove a big political headache for the administration, the Society of Actuaries estimated Tuesday that insurers will have to pay out an average of 32 percent more for claims on individual health policies under the Affordable Care Act,  a cost likely to be passed on to consumers.

In response, the Obama administration questions that conclusion, though, claiming that higher costs will be offset by . . . , well, . . . you have to read it to believe it:

The administration questions the design of the study, saying it focused only on one piece of the puzzle and ignored cost relief strategies in the law such as tax credits to help people afford premiums and special payments to insurers who attract an outsize share of the sick.

Obama may think that money grows on trees but the rest of us know that those credits and subsidies will ultimately be paid for by the only place that the government gets its money: taxpayers.  So, the administration's plan is to offset higher insurance costs by raising taxes!

If Obamacare wasn't such a disaster, it would be easier to enjoy the comic relief provided by its defenders.

Of course, it is a disaster.  The future of Obamacare is clearly seen in the "harrowing neglect and abuse" (click for BBC story) that the British experience daily under their National Health Service.

Krugman: failure to believe in global warmism is a sin

Paul Krugman

In an otherwise uninteresting rant on the evils of the private automobile and the freedom that it provides, the New York Times' Paul Krugman writes:

And the thing is that these are externalities that everyone can see. You can deny global warming (and may you be punished in the afterlife for doing so — this kind of denial for petty personal or political reasons is an almost inconceivable sin). But can anyone deny that more drivers means more traffic congestion?

Liberals apparently do not object to mentioning concepts like the "afterlife" or "sin" unless it is a conservative who does the mentioning.

Incidentally, if the failure to believe in global warming alarmism really were an "inconceivable sin," then 30,000 American scientists would be going to hell.

Hat tip: WattsUpWithThat.

PREVIOUSLY on liberals and religion:
•Obama declares that God has "commanded" us to fund green energy.
•Pew study: Democrats believe in ghosts
•Obama declares he is on a mission from God
•Keith Olberman professes belief in God!
•Democrats declare that God directs the weather
•Obama campaign becomes a "transcendent" "religious" movement
•Atheism is a belief shared by Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, and Democrats
•Obama supporters tell of spiritual conversion

Reagan 1 Liberals 0: US deploys star wars

From NBC News:

US to deploy more ground-based missile interceptors as North Korea steps up threats

By M. Alex Johnson, staff writer, NBC News

The U.S. is deploying 14 new ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska to counter renewed nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday.

The new interceptors will be based at Fort Greely, an Army launch site about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, and are projected to be fully deployed by 2017, Hagel said. The additions will bring the U.S.-based ground interceptor deployment from 30 to 44, including four that are based in California.

One of the most bitter political battles in the 1980s was over missile defense. Liberals claimed it was impossible. They claimed that "all experts agree" that it is 'impossible to hit a missile with a missile.' Once again, their "experts" were wrong.  By deploying missile defense, the Obama administration is tacitly admitting it.

PREVIOUSLY on liberal "experts" getting things wrong:
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•Federal Judge rejects Federal environmental "science" as "arbitrary and capricious"
•2 more examples of politicized science: Gulf oil spill and California's air regulations
•AIDS advocates distorted science
•Politicized science of crime statistics
•Politicization of medical science
•Bee colony collapse disorder: the cause is whatever your politics say it is
•The collapse of the UN IPCC's credibility
•Yet another UN IPCC Glacier-gate scandal
•UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud
•UN IPCC responds to Climategate with wild accusations
•Global warming and the test of science, III
•Global warming and the test of science, II
•Global warming and the test of science, I
•141 scientists wrote letter to UN challenging global warming hysteria.
•NASA's global warming scientists caught hyping false data
•The resemblance of global warming true-believers to Islamists

How rich is North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un?

There is an old Chinese proverb, "become a government official, get rich,"  meaning that the government service is filled with opportunities for graft.  Although the proverb dates back to imperial times, it continues to be true in modern communist/socialist countries.  Just like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, North Korea's Kim Jong-Un has become fabulously wealthy.  The South Korean newspaper Cho Sun has details:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has stashed away some US$4-5 billion in bank accounts in other people's names in Austria, China, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Russia, Singapore and Switzerland, intelligence agencies believe.

Where does his money come from? The usual: illegal trade in weapons and drugs, counterfeit currency, and such:

Most of Kim's slush funds are foreign-currency revenues generated by North Korean businesses attached to the military or other government entities. Some of the money comes from legitimate activities, such as sales of agricultural and fisheries products or minerals and North Korean laborers working abroad. But the bulk comes from illicit activities such as selling drugs, dealing in counterfeit money, cigarettes, liquor or exporting weapons.

What about the international sanctions imposed on N. Korea? The Russian mob knows how to get around them:

Since high-ranking North Korean officials and state agencies have been banned from engaging in financial transactions overseas, Pyongyang is apparently relying on the Russian mafia to launder money and operate secret slush funds.

Although liberals often claim to have great faith in international sanctions, here as elsewhere, they seem to have little practical effect.

Hat tip: GatewayPundit.